


Convergence

by Tarlan



Category: Terminator (Movies), Terminator Genisys (2015), Terminator Salvation (2009)
Genre: M/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-03 15:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5296754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/pseuds/Tarlan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Although his body was part machine, his heart and his mind were human, so whether it was Skynet's programming or a part of his humanity didn't really matter. He still fell in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Convergence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/gifts).



> The timeline in the Terminator movies is completely confusing in places. The only possibility that makes sense is for **Terminator Salvation** to be set in 2028 rather than 2018. **Reason:** In 2032 John sent back Kyle to 1984, and Kyle was around 22 years old. This means Kyle was born around 2009-10, which matches the events of T1, T2, T3 and T5 ( **Terminator Genisys** has Kyle at 7-8 years old in 2017). T4 ( **Terminator Salvation** ) has Kyle at 17-18 in 2018, so I think someone miskeyed the date and T4 should have been set in **2028** , 4 years before Kyle is sent back to protect Sarah. Therefore, I'm setting my events of **Terminator Salvation** in 2028.
> 
> Written for [spock](http://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/pseuds/spock) \- I really hope you enjoy this story. HAPPY YULETIDE 2015!

**2028 to 2032**

Serena Kogan had promised him a second chance to live again but he hadn't believed that for a second. His whole life had consisted of one mess followed by another, culminating in an attempted armed robbery that went to hell. His psycho brother had opted for suicide by cop, taking out two of them in the process, but Marcus had dropped his gun, choosing a slower death as he awaited execution by the State. Three years in prison had given him the time he'd never had while growing up to study the world of nurture versus nature, wondering if he could have been a better person if he'd been raised differently. He knew it would have made no difference with his brother if they'd been rich or poor, happy or miserable, abused or not. Marcus might have shared the same gene pool with his twin brother but he had never suffered from the same psychotic behavior. Despite their similarities in looks they were not identical twins; their brain chemistry had been different.

Through all his years on Death Row he had never once turned to religion like other inmates facing execution. He didn't believe in any god, and with nothing else to do he had spent the time improving his mind with philosophical ideals, and how they stood against the growth of technology in this age of computers. Perhaps it was this combined with his family's colorful history that had drawn Serena Kogan's attention to him.

On that final day as he awaited the walk to the execution chamber, Marcus had asked for a single kiss from Doctor Kogan, but not because he wanted one last taste of a woman. Anyone would have done, male or female. He'd never given a damn about gender as long as the feeling was good, but she was there and she wanted his body - at least, for science. She had tasted of death, of the bitterness of the drugs and chemotherapy she was taking to prolong her failing life, caught in her own macabre version of death row. When he reached the execution chamber he saw her sitting in the witness room, waiting like a vulture for his body's last gasp before swooping in to feed off him in the name of science.

He awoke confused and disoriented, unable to comprehend the death and destruction of the entire world when he crawled from his makeshift tomb deep beneath the ground.

Marcus hadn't believed Kogan and it turned out she hadn't lied to him. Not completely. She had promised him a second chance but when he interfaced with Skynet he learned that this had not been for his benefit but for Skynet. He was Skynet's back up plan when it failed to kill Sarah Connor in 1984, and when it failed yet again to kill John Connor as a boy and as a man too. Each attempt had altered the past as it tried to save its future. He'd been created and activated with one mission buried deep into his psyche: to find Kyle Reese and bring him to Skynet.

Marcus felt sick, used as the ultimate infiltration Terminator unit, but Skynet had miscalculated how the organic computer inside his head would react. It had understood the biology of the human brain but not that undefinable part they called the human soul. Perhaps Kogan had miscalculated too when she chose him as her subject for experimentation. His psychotic twin would have fulfilled Skynet's requirements perfectly.

The hidden command and desire to seek out Kyle Reese had backfired spectacularly for although his body was mostly machine, his heart and his mind were still human. Unlike his brother he had the capacity to feel remorse for his actions, and love for his fellow humans. He had the ability to fall in love, and he would have fallen for Kyle Reese even without the programming.

He offered his heart to save John Connor because Kyle's destiny was already written in the DNA of the man dying on the medtable before him. Kyle's heart belonged to a woman who had lived and died in the past, and there was nothing Marcus could do to change that destiny despite all of Connor's claims that the future was not set.

He did it for Kyle, who saw John Connor as a hero, and he did it for himself to send a big _FUCK YOU_ to Skynet.

He never expected to wake up again, blinking in confusion when Kate Connor's face swam into view.

"What happened? Where's Connor?"

Kate looked away, lips tightening as if forcibly holding back her words.

"The heart transfer-?"

She looked back. "Was a success. Your heart saved him."

"Then why am I still here?"

"Because I gave you John's damaged heart."

"I don't understand."

"Your body is part machine, with an ability to regenerate organic tissue." She smiled slightly again and Marcus frowned when he realized her face was older, as if a decade had passed since he last opened his eyes. "It was a gamble and I thought it had failed. We buried you so long ago."

"When? How much time?"

"Four years and three months."

"Kyle?"

Her weak smile faltered completely and she shook her head. "Gone. Presumed dead, a long time ago."

Connor had said the future wasn't set but if John Connor still existed then Kyle had gone back in time to save Connor's mother - and become Connor's father, dying in the process. Marcus hadn't expected to feel pain at the loss and for a moment he wondered if it was some residual part of Skynet's programming still affecting him, except he had burned out all of Skynet's influence over him when he tore out the chip at the base of his skull.

Skynet had orchestrated the initial attraction in its need to have Kyle Reese captured before he could sire John Connor, but everything since that first meeting with Kyle in the rubble of Los Angeles was as much human emotion and biology as it was computer generated conditioning. Kyle had saved his life on the first day they met, and then offered to share what little he had with Marcus even though there was barely enough food to stave off the hunger pangs. He had won over Marcus's hardened human heart in a single beat, giving him a purpose sorely lacking in his previous human existence; enough to break Skynet's control. But there was more to Kate's story. He could tell from the pain in her eyes that she could no longer conceal.

"What happened?"

"I was in the second wave. I saw them use the time machine to send Kyle back. But Skynet chose that moment to attack John. He's..." Her face crumpled, tears filling her eyes.

He asked again, tone harder and more demanding. "What happened?"

"He's gone! A T-5000 infected John with nanites and Skynet sent him back into the past to protect it from the very beginning of its awareness. It's over. We've lost."

Marcus took a moment to digest her words and the implication that John Connor, face of the resistance and savior of the human race, had become its destroyer. He listened as she described the events of the past, feeling the memories of this new timeline bubble up from deep inside, conflicting with what he had known from another time.

"The future isn't set," he murmured, seeing the ebb and flow of time as each intrusion into the past rippled outwards; fluid, yet like a river still flowing forward as if those changes were small rocks that only momentarily diverted its course. John Connor's knowledge of the future had ended the moment he sent Kyle back in time, chasing after the Terminator sent to kill Sarah Connor, but Marcus now held memories of other failed attempts against an even younger Sarah Connor, back in 1973. Yet in each timeline the river flowed to that one point in time, in 2032. The technology advances between each delayed Armageddon merely hastened the fall of humanity, bringing them all back to that same point in time; a convergence.

"No. We continue fighting. We have to," he insisted, because if they didn't then Kyle had died in vain, and the thought of that was intolerable. "The future isn't set. We go back to Skynet and we find another way to shut it down."

****

**2033 - War's End**

Marcus had never expected to become the face of the resistance, but the troops rallied to him even though they were still rocking from the body blow of losing Connor to their enemy. They followed him back into Skynet's main control complex, fighting side by side with him every step of the way. They watched him reconnect and systematically destroy Skynet using its own programming against it, chasing its core program through a worldwide network until Skynet was trapped in this single, massive data center surrounding them.

"You really don't want to do this, Marcus. I can give you everything you desire."

The face on the view screen altered several times before finally settling on the face of the T-5000 that had infected Connor; it manifested in physical form and halted in front of Marcus, its features melting away and reforming into the familiar face of an older but still recognizable Kyle Reese. Taking advantage of Marcus's surprise, a hand whipped out with inhuman speed to pierce Marcus's skin, injecting nanites into him. He felt them crawling through his body, flowing through the arteries, both human and machine. For a moment Marcus was lost, feeling his body bending to Skynet's will but the evil smirk that had no place on Kyle Reese's handsome face ignited a rage inside of him.

All his life he had been used and abused. By the psychotic brother who was born six minutes earlier than him, by the father who took out his impotent rage against the universe on his wife and children's flesh, by the authorities who had promised life imprisonment but instead gave him the death penalty. Even Serena Kogan had used him, wanting to escape her sick human body and live forever as part of the machine, using him as a test subject. And now Skynet was using the face of the only good person Marcus had ever met in his entire miserable life, corrupting his memories of Kyle Reese.

He forced back the nanites, pushing them out of his body, gathering strength as Skynet's Kyle Reese face lost its smirk once it realized it was losing this final battle.

"I can give you want you want most," it communicated, pleading deep within his brain. "I can give you Kyle Reese."

Marcus faltered for a moment but then continued the assault, using the nanites against their master, turning them into a computer virus that infiltrated Skynet's final bolt hole deep inside the complex before issuing one final command to the operating system:

DELETE.

Around him everything switched off, plunging them into darkness, and leaving just a single flashing prompt on the massive screen before them. With a single mental command Marcus issued the reboot of the basic operating system to restore light and power to the installation, but not to Skynet.

The war was over. Skynet had been deleted.

The radio calls came in immediately from all around the world. Terminator units had frozen on the battlefields, and Hunter-Killers had fallen from the skies, no longer under Skynet's control, but while everyone around him was celebrating, slapping backs, and hugging each other, Marcus was diving back into the memory storage until he found what he needed. He played back the security footage from the moment Kyle was sent back in time to 1984, watching as the T-5000 slipped through the human soldiers, camouflaged as one of them, and attacked John Connor.

Something was off, though, so he delved deeper.

"Kate," he called urgently, and everyone stopped to watch the main screen as it homed in on a laboratory deep inside the complex. The security cameras focused on a single figure frozen in stasis.

"Oh my God!" Kate exclaimed.

John Connor wasn't dead.

"Skynet infected him, but what went back in time to protect Skynet from Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese was an advanced T-3000 containing Connor's memories and a part of his personality, twisted by Skynet. The real John Connor is still here in that laboratory."

"The nanites?"

"There's nothing left of Skynet to control those nanites. From what I can see, they'll flush out of his body in a matter of days now they're deactivated."

Kate and a couple of soldiers rushed off to set John free leaving Marcus to turn his attention back to Skynet's last words, that it had the means of returning Kyle Reese to him. Closing his eyes he searched his new memories of this timeline, finding no record of Kyle's death in 1984. Yet he found evidence of the same Kyle Reese a few decades later in 2017, trying to stop Genisys - the day Skynet was due to come online across the world. He found no evidence of Kyle dying in the explosion that almost saw the destruction of Skynet. Unfortunately for mankind, it had already protected its core program deep within the complex. Kyle and Sarah simply vanished at that point, falling off the grid as Skynet regained control and launched its worldwide attack on humanity in 2026.

Marcus found the code to activate the time machine, feeling his heartbeat quicken with renewed purpose. He could jump back in time to Kyle's last known location and use what remained of Skynet's programming inside his head to scour the planet for him. He could... He paused in thought. He could do nothing. The tension in his body slumped away in realization. He couldn't go back in time because the future was not set, and if he meddled in the past then he could undo all they had accomplished today. Skynet might survive this attack and the remnants of the human race could be destroyed before another chance to delete Skynet presented itself to them.

Marcus hung his head. It was over, and whether his feelings for Kyle were real or just the ghostly echoes of Skynet's programming no longer mattered as everything he had learned from John Connor implied Kyle had fallen in love with Sarah Connor in 1984, and she had loved him back. Feeling sick inside he knew he couldn't bring Kyle back to this time frame because he had no idea how that one action would change the past, and alter this future. He wasn't even sure how Kyle would react to being brought back to the future, if he would hate Marcus for tearing him away from Sarah Connor.

"Marcus?"

The familiar voice caught his attention and he turned to face a haggard John Connor supported by two soldiers.

"Kate told me everything," Connor stated, awkwardly drawing Marcus in for a hug. "Thank you," he whispered. "Thank you."

After Connor pulled back Marcus spent a moment focused on the other man's scarred face, trying to see the echoes of the father in the son's features. But Connor took after his mother, with only the smallest signs of Kyle Reese's DNA: the high cheek bones, the shape of his eyes, but he had also inherited the same fierce, innate goodness that had broken Skynet's hold on Marcus, and made Connor such a revered leader.

His gaze dropped to the hand held out to him, seeing a small data device nestled in the palm of Connor's hand. 

"I found this when we first entered the complex, placed inside the entry encryption box. I think we should hear this together," John murmured, handing over the data device.

Marcus stared at it for a moment, playing with it in his hand before plugging it into an isolated computer terminal, interfacing with it directly before setting it to play out loud. He recognized Sarah Connor's voice and looked to Connor to see his reaction, finding him looking intrigued.

"...Maybe it'll be enough if you know that in the time we had together we came to love..." The recording was lost in static for a moment. "...not with the passion I had anticipated from the stories told to me.... in love..... Marcus.... enough for us to bring you into this world, loved. John..." More static drowned out her words, though sometimes not quite enough to erase them altogether. "...whether you should be born at all. But we feared..... delay in the start of.... war... wi.. machines.... Humanity would need you to lead them from the brink of.... hilation to the edge of victory. K... doesn't belong here.... wish... send him home....."

The rest of the recording ended in static.

"Kyle was by my side when I broke the encryption lock and gained entry," Connor stated softly. "I think he or Sarah must have placed it there for me to find only if the future played out this same way."

"Kyle wanted to come back to the future," Marcus murmured convinced the person in question was Kyle because Marcus had seen the fate of the T-3000 version of John Connor in Skynet's memories. It had been destroyed back in 2017 along with the T-850 that had protected Sarah Connor. He realized Sarah must have returned to 1983 to have their son or John Connor would still be in his teens rather than a man in his forties, but had Kyle gone back with her or had he tried to return to 2032 even if that meant surviving the long years of war in between.

_I can give you Kyle Reese._

Was it possible Skynet had the older Kyle Reese, hoping to use him as a bargaining chip?

It took longer to search through the memory banks and Marcus almost missed the entry within a hidden directory among the thousands of records of humans captured and experimented upon. With dismay he recognized the underground facility as the same place he had awoken four years earlier, aware that most of it had been destroyed. He found the directory only because Skynet had sent in machines to search for one specific human held in stasis since 2028, the year Marcus first met a young Kyle Reese. On a hunch he looked through the records of humans in stasis within this complex, and he found a single anomaly around the same time as Skynet's search of the destroyed facility.

This time Marcus needed to be the one to open that sealed laboratory, though he didn't stop John Connor from following. He stepped inside the small laboratory and froze, overwhelmed momentarily by the sight of Kyle Reese looking exactly as he had in the 2032 surveillance footage. The adolescent was gone, becoming a man in the intervening years since Marcus last saw him.

Marcus took the final few steps up to the stasis unit and keyed the release sequence, watching as the transparent canopy lifted aside with a pneumatic hiss. On the table, Kyle began to stir, pale eyelashes fluttering as he slowly regained consciousness. At first Kyle looked groggy and confused but his dark blue eyes widened when they finally latched onto Marcus. Marcus heard a soft gasp as Kyle's hand reached up to touch Marcus's face, thumb brushing over his lips.

"Marcus?" His voice was rough from years held in stasis but filled with awe. "Is it really you?"

Marcus closed his eyes for a second, leaning into the hand cupping his cheek. "Yes."

His eyes flew open in startlement as Kyle surged up, lips smashing against Marcus's in desperation before he pulled back a fraction and whispered roughly, "I crossed time for you. To save you. Marcus," he whispered once more before kissing him again, and this time Marcus kissed him back with all the ferocity he had held back, wrapping his arms around Kyle almost too tightly.

"You're crushing me," Kyle chuckled, but his own grip on Marcus was almost as hard.

****

**Epilogue:**

The war between humanity and Skynet ended in 2033, and the remnants of the human race came out from the shadows, sewers, and underground shelters, working together slowly to rebuild a future for them and their children beneath the sun.

As the years passed, Marcus found a contentment and sense of purpose that had eluded him in his previous existence. His organic parts aged at the same rate as a human, his machine parts began to cease with increased age too, but he didn't mind. He never thought he'd have the chance to grow old with someone he loved, but Kyle remained by his side through the long years; his partner, lover, and best friend.

Serena Kogan had not lied to him after all.

END  
 


End file.
